Page 94 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

HIGH STRUCTURALISM

does in fact recognize in the reader a point at which intertextual meaning
can finally become focused: the reader, he writes, is the “someone
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written
text is constituted”. But this reader is nonetheless “without history,
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biography, psychology”. That is, it is not an empirically concrete
reader which concerns Barthes, but rather, the structural rôle of the
reader, to borrow a phrase of Umberto Eco. Barthes’s structuralism
27
is here concerned, not with the intrinsic properties of the text, but
with the conventions that render it intelligible to the reader. This
intelligibility is, however, a function of the discourse itself, rather
than of any individual reader’s capacities and interests. This entire
argument, which became extremely influential both in France and
elsewhere, is informed throughout by a rigorous theoretical anti-
humanism, which is in no way belied by its merely rhetorical conclusion
that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
Author”. 28
Where Barthes happily announced himself a structuralist, Foucault
repeatedly denied any such theoretical affinities and predilections. 29
In the most specifically Saussurean of senses, we might very well endorse
such protestations. But, in a more general sense, Foucault’s earlier
work is indeed structuralist. His first truly influential books, Madness
and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, were published in French
30
in 1961 and 1963. In both, Foucault was concerned to establish the
systematic, and in its own terms perfectly valid, nature of the dominant
understandings of madness and of illness of the 17th and early 18th
centuries; and to contrast these with the new, equally systematic, and
equally internally valid, conceptions which emerged, very rapidly, in
the late 18th century. For Foucault, the later conceptions are merely
different, not better. What matters is not the epistemological problem
of truth, but rather what we might term the sociological problem of
the fit between new ways of knowing and new institutional practices.
This earlier institutional emphasis is temporarily superseded by a
much more deliberate focus on discourse as such, both in The Order
of Things, first published in 1966 as Les Mots et les Choses, and in
31
The Archaeology of Knowledge, first published in 1969. Here Foucault
defines the objects of his inquiry as discursive formations, or epistemes,
that is, systematic conceptual frameworks which define their own
truth criteria, according to which particular knowledge problems are
to be resolved, and which are embedded in and imply particular

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